There have been a bunch of new releases in the Goodies during the last few days.

Midori 1.5.0

This new release mainly brings changes under the hood which aim at easing the future development of the application and its stability. A lot of old code which was used to provide backward compatibility for the old Webkit releases was removed, as well as the internal source viewer: Midori now uses your default text editor.

There are also some visible changes: it is now possible to download files directly, without using an external application and a new extension called 'Colorful Tabs' makes your browser shiny!

Xfce Power Manager 0.6.5 and 0.8.0 alpha

Two releases during the last few days: a stable release and an alpha release for the future 0.8.0.

The 0.6.5 version provides the standard Freedesktop.org inhibit interface which allows you to prevent power managers to suspend, shutdown, etc your computer under certain conditions.

The 0.8.0 version contains far more changes. The user interface was simplified and the inhibit and power management standard interfaces have also been added. Xfce Power Manager is now able to detect if your session is idle and to reduce the brightness in that case, it can also detect if you are watching a movie and then disables screen suspending or brightness reduction. Two new panel plugins are available: one to set the brightness of the screen and the other one to manage the inhibit stuff. Your suspend, sleep and brightness keys should also be detected correctly.

The developer of this applications would appreciate if people could test this alpha release and report any bug on the Xfce Bugzilla.

Xfmpc 0.1.0

Xfmpc now has an additional developer who will speed the development up. This release features a preferences dialog for the MPD server and the appearance of the player, and improved play list with new context menus to show information about the songs, to add and remove songs, etc. A search entry was also added to the song database browser to find songs easily.

Xfce Clipman Plugin 0.9.1

This is a minor bug fix release which fixes some little issues. The next release (1.0) should be far more exciting with the actions support: the plugin will be able to execute some actions when it detects a given pattern in your clipboard.

Having Xfce translated into as many languages as possible and maintaining translations of high quality is essential. People will not use a desktop environment that they do not understand! The Xfce i18n Project is in charge of this task and always needs new contributors. You do not need any particular skill, except understanding English, writing your own language correctly and motivation.

Let's see how you can contribute to this project.

First step: contact any existing translators for your language

Their might already be contributors to the translation of Xfce into your language listed on this page. If this is the case, you should get in touch with them and ask them how you can help. If the page is not up to date, you should warn us or update it yourself.

Let's see how to translate an application or to update a translation now.

Second step: download the translation files

The applications are translated using pot files, with a 'po' extension: those files basically contain each English string and its translation. There is also a template for creating a pot file for a new translation: it is the file which has a 'pot' extension. Every time a developper changes a string in the application, he will update the pot files and the translation will have to be updated accordingly.

Those files are located on the Xfce SVN to ease cooperation and distribution. We will use a script to ease the downloading of those files, this script will also allow you to update your pot files easily. This script requires Subversion to work.

Download the script and move it to a folder where you want to store the pot files. Then run the following command in this directory to make the script executable:

chmod +x xdt-i18n

Then, use this command to get the pot files for the core applications for the first time:

xdt-i18n init xfce/trunk

And for the goodies:

xdt-i18n init goodies/trunk

You should always make sure that you are using the latest pot files when starting to translate a project. This command allows you to update the pot files quickly:

xdt-i18n update

Third step: start translating

The script above downloaded the latest translation files and put them in separate folder. Go to the folder of the application you want to translate or or of the application whose translation you want to improve. The translation files will be available in a po folder. If there is a file for your language, you will be able to start translating directly. If not you will have to create a file for your language by copying the pot file and renaming it to your_locale_identifier.po. To find the locale identifier, you can use this page.

To translate, open the po file using your favorite text editor. You will see a main header composed of likes similar to this:

Update the PO-Revision-Date field with the current date and time and the Last-Translator field with your name and your email so that the next translator can contact you if he has some questions. After that you can start the real translation job.

Every sentence already translated is displayed in the po file as the following one:

msgid "Invalid file name"
msgstr "Nom de fichier non valide"

Untranslated strings are displayed as this one:

msgid "Only local files may be renamed"
msgstr ""

Some strings may also be marked as fuzzy, which means that the original sentence has changed a bit and that the translation is not totally wrong but still needs to be checked and/or fixed. Make sure to remove the '#,fuzzy' after fixing the string.

#, fuzzy
msgid "Screenshot.png"
msgstr " Screenshot"

msgid allows you to identify the original string and msgstr to identify the translated strings. Modifying the msgid strings will have no effect, if you see a typo in one of them, file a bug. To translate a string or update a translation, just modify the text between the "" in the msgstr field.

Some strings may contain slashes or weird characters such as "%s" or "%i". You should always make sure that those characters are also present in the translated string in the same order, or the application will be broken in your language. To check if your translation is valid, the xdt-i18n script offers a check option which will check all po files for your language:

xdt-i18n check your_language_code.po

If it displays any warning, you must fix it before sharing your translation.

You can also use this script to see the stats for a given language, that is to say the number of translated messages, the number of fuzzy and untranslated ones:

xdt-i18n stat your_language_code.po

You can also use Poedit to modify the po files. It updates the po headers automatically, sorts the strings by category (translated, fuzzy and untranslated) and provides a friendly interface.

Fourth step: get your translation in

Once you are done with your translations, go to the root of your xfce/trunk folder or goodies/trunk folder and use the following command to create a patch named my_language.diff containing your translations:

svn diff > my_language.diff

If there is a maintainer for your language, you should send him this file asking him politely to review it and get it in. If not, you should send it to the Xfce i18n mailing list where someone will review it and get it in.

Now that all Xfce dependencies have been removed from libxfce4menu, I'm planning to rename it to something more generic. Travis Watkins from Alacarte has expressed interest in helping with writing the XfceMenuEditor (err GDesktopMenuEditor) part. He is also working on Vala bindings for the library.

With a more complete API and polished code perhaps we can even move gdesktopmenu over to freedesktop.org ... who knows.

During the last few days, I found some time to improve Xfce4 Screenshooter and implement some new features.

Interface

The interface has been slightly improved, it should be more user friendly and take less space. I also added an option allowing you to chose whether the mouse pointer should be displayed on the screenshot.

Improved 'Region' mode

When selecting a region to be screenshooted using the mouse, you can now use the Escape key to cancel the operation.

Saving screenshots to remote locations

It is now possible to save screenshots to remote locations such as FTP, computers accessible via SSH, a Samba shared folder... The window below is displayed to show the progress of the upload and to cancel it.

This is totally transparent for the user. Remote locations connected with Gigolo or gvfs-connect are automatically available in the save dialog, as any other local folder.

I still have to update the documentation for those new features and to improve various other points, a new release might be out in May.

I've semi-officially (whatever that means) started working on my thesis on migrating Thunar from ThunarVFS to GIO. I'll work on it in public. That means research material, testing results, status reports and of course the code will be publically available in a read-only wiki and our Subversion repository in a special branch respectively.

I'm always open to suggestions and opinions. Just drop me a mail if you have something to say.

If everything goes as planned (err, did I really sayplanned?) GIO will land in Thunar 1.2 which is supposed to be released along with Xfce 4.8. There's no warranty for this though.

I just had a look at the screenshots of Parcellite, a GTK+ clipboard manager, mainly because I didn't know what it is.

And just like with Getting Things Done tools before, I immediately had a few ideas how clipboard managers like this could be improved.

If you add a file or a URI to the clipboard, what do you expect to see in a visualization of the clipboard? Do you expect to see the path or filename or do you expect to see an icon and the filename together with a button to open or launch that file? Maybe even a possiblity to drag the item into a file manager or some other program? It's very easy to do things like that with GIO or even ThunarVFS.

What if you copy an email address into the clipboard? Do you expect only to see the email address or would you rather like to see the email address with one or two buttons (add to addressbook, send email)?

What are your experiences with clipboard tools? Are you using them at all? If not, why? What features would you like to see in a clipboard manager to make it attractive to use?

Yes, the git-clone man page tells me that, when using a local pathname (and not using a file: URI), it assumes the other repo is local and uses hardlinks between the repos. But hey, if I specify --no-hardlinks when cloning, I still get all branches if I use the "../airconfig" method.

And if I go to machine2 and do "git clone machine1:src/airconfig" I get the same broken result with the file:// method.

Git, I think you rock. But why does your user interface suck so much? And why do you just appear to be broken right now? I can't seem to find anything else in the man page to help here. (I'm using git 1.6.1.3 if that matters.)

Yes, the git-clone man page tells me that, when using a local pathname (and not using a file: URI), it assumes the other repo is local and uses hardlinks between the repos. But hey, if I specify –no-hardlinks when cloning, I still get all branches if I use the “../airconfig” method.

And if I go to machine2 and do “git clone machine1:src/airconfig” I get the same broken result with the file:// method.

Git, I think you rock. But why does your user interface suck so much? And why do you just appear to be broken right now? I can’t seem to find anything else in the man page to help here. (I’m using git 1.6.1.3 if that matters.)

So I have a git repo on my machine at home, that's cloned from a repo on git.xfce.org. I was doing some work in it the other day -- in a private branch, not published to git.xfce.org -- and I wanted to continue working on the private branch from another machine. But... it won't work. Let's say 'machine1' has the repo with the private branch, and 'machine2' is where I want to work today.

And then at the bottom it prints out a message about not knowing which local branches to merge stuff into. That's fine, no big deal. But... how come it pulled 3 of my local branches on machine1, but left off 2 of them ('notification-rework' and 'nm-frontend'). No combination of src:dest refspecs seem to do the trick. Pulling one of the 3 branches it seems to like using the syntax I used above seems to work fine, but it can't see the one I want. What am I doing wrong...?